The Spy Who Was Left Behind

by Michael Pullara

  But I would need to be ready. I flew home to Houston and hired a technologically adept student to scan my entire file to a flash drive and run it through an optical character recognition program. From that day forward, everywhere I went I carried a dozen years of evidence on a lanyard around my neck.

  I had it with me six months later when the Georgian army began an artillery barrage on the South Ossetian city of Tskhinvali. It felt odd and a little terrifying to watch an armed conflict unfold and know the backstory behind the bloodshed. But the thing that really confounded me was the timing. The Russo-Georgian War started on August 8, 2008—exactly fifteen years to the day since the murder of Freddie Woodruff.

  Russia accused Saakashvili of “aggression against South Ossetia” and launched a large-scale land, air, and sea invasion. Tanks poured through the Roki Tunnel, and ground troops opened a second front in Abkhazia. It was the first time since the fall of the Soviet Union that the Russian military was used against an independent state.

  And the mismatch soon became a rout. On August 12—four days after the war began—Russian president Dmitry Medvedev proclaimed a unilateral cessation of his “peace enforcement” operation. At the time of this announcement there was no credible military force standing between the Russian army and Tbilisi. Misha had made a massive miscalculation and Georgian independence now hung by a single thread. Without vigorous American support the little country would be reabsorbed into the Russian empire.

  I watched these events unfold with a growing sense of regret. This was the crisis I had hoped to leverage—the moment when Georgia’s need for positive Western publicity could be exploited to secure Anzor’s release. But I was missing the moment because I didn’t have an ongoing partnership with a Western journalist.

  But that was all about to change. On August 19 I received an e-mail from a man named Andrew Higgins. He identified himself as a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal and said that he wanted to talk with me about the murder of Freddie Woodruff.

  “I’ve kept an eye on this case—from a distance—ever since ’93, when I happened to be in Tbilisi at the time of the killing,” he said. “I’ve always thought the official version of what happened was, to put it mildly, somewhat fishy.”

  I called him immediately. The idea for Higgins to contact me had originated with Thomas Goltz. The two veteran reporters were lamenting the frustrating reality of their chosen profession: A journalist has a front-row view of history but is very seldom allowed to intervene in a way that makes someone’s life better. But then Goltz remembered me. “There is a story you can tell,” he said to Higgins, “a good story. And telling it will save someone’s life.”

  Higgins was leaving for Tbilisi in a week and wanted a quick rundown of my fifteen-year obsession. I tried to condense it but was defeated by the task. And so I leapt into the darkness.

  “Let me go to Georgia with you,” I said.

  Three days later I was standing in the Paris bureau of the Wall Street Journal handing a virtual stranger an electronic copy of my entire file. This was my last best chance. And I held nothing back.

  I’m not sure what Higgins had expected, but he seemed surprised by what he read. “You’ve got a lot more here than just theories,” he said.

  I gave him contact information for Georgia Woodruff Alexander, Dell Spry, and Irakli Okruashvili. He spoke with each of them in turn and quickly concluded that the official story of Freddie’s murder had “more holes than Swiss cheese.”

  By the time we boarded the red-eye to Tbilisi, I had an ally. We flew together with Cindy McCain and her Secret Service detail. I later realized that the wife of Senator John McCain was only one in a series of American dignitaries who cycled through Tbilisi during the crisis. Together these government VIPs provided a kind of human shield protecting the city from the insult of Russian invasion.

  We got to the Marriott Hotel on Rustaveli Avenue at about 4 a.m. It was the new standard of luxury built after the Rose Revolution. And even in the wee hours of the morning it was a beehive of activity. The Georgian government had installed a big map in the hotel lobby. It showed troop deployments and was staffed twenty-four hours a day by representatives from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. They were there to persuade the international press corps that Georgia was an innocent victim of Russian aggression.

  But Higgins never stopped to talk to them. “They aren’t news,” he said. His investigation of the story was methodical, disciplined, and smart. He read everything, talked to everyone, and believed only what he could prove. He had an eye for irony and a nose for bullshit. And he really wanted to know why I’d done all this.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Seemed like the right thing to do at the time.”

  We went over and over the same material—each time from a slightly different perspective. He would press me on key points, asking for documentary proof, third-party witnesses, and independent verification. Soon the tone of his questions began to shift: less confrontational, more collegial. He’d begun to expect that I would have evidence for my assertions—and to believe that I would tell him the truth.

  But he still wouldn’t let me go with him on the interviews. He’d go off to Shevardnadze’s compound or Bedoidze’s hillside shack and I would sit in the hotel and brood. I was an advocate and I wanted to advocate.

  “Trust the process,” I told myself. But it wasn’t easy. I had invested an enormous amount of time and treasure in an untested theory: that well-timed use of the Western news media could induce the Georgian government to give Anzor justice. I had, in effect, appealed my case to the American public. And I was hoping that the power of the press to generate negative public opinion in America would be sufficient to cause Misha Saakashvili to do the right thing in Georgia.

  As far as I could tell, the timing was perfect. The Georgian government was frantically trying to cultivate and manipulate Western public opinion. Misha had lost the military war. He was scrambling not to lose the propaganda war.

  I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to get Irakli Batiashvili to talk with Higgins. The former minister had been pardoned after serving only six months in prison—but he had apparently been permanently scarred by the experience of incarceration. The layers of security that now surrounded him prevented my direct contact.

  And then I got a telephone call from his fifteen-year-old daughter, Irina. Could I meet her mother, Maya Batiashvili, for coffee in thirty minutes? The circumstances of the invitation seemed designed to make me hurry. I rushed out of the hotel and jogged down the sidewalk. Before long I was sweating. It was hot and noisy in the city. I was out of breath when I arrived at the coffee shop. Irina and Maya were waiting for me inside. They sat facing the door with their backs against the wall. And they looked nervous.

  The girl started talking as soon as I sat down. “Mother doesn’t speak English,” she said. “She’s here to tell you what Father says. And I’m here to translate.”

  Maya rattled off the message in Georgian and Irina nodded.

  “Father says he can tell you what you want to know about the murder of Freddie Woodruff,” she said. “But if you want him to tell you who killed the CIA man and why they killed him, then you must give him certain assurances first.”

  “Certain assurances,” echoed Maya in English. It was obvious that she didn’t understand the words and equally obvious that she recognized this was the exact sound that her husband had told them to make. “Father said you would know what that means,” she said. “Certain assurances.”

  I felt a sudden surge of adrenaline. My vision became sharper, my hearing more keen. Time slowed down and my reflexes sped up. I was terrified. Notwithstanding all of my denials, Irakli Batiashvili still believed that I was an agent of the US government. And—based on this belief—he was offering to give me everything I wanted in exchange for a promise of US support and protection.

  I could buy it all with a lie.

  I took a deep breath before I answered. I was certain that if
Irakli misunderstood me in even the smallest detail, then someone—perhaps even me—might die. “I am just a lawyer,” I said. “I do not have authority to give you any assurances on behalf of the US government. If you need those assurances before you can tell me what happened to Freddie, then you absolutely must not tell me what happened to him.”

  Maya listened as her daughter translated and hope slowly melted off of her face. She left the café without ever having a cup of coffee. Irakli never told me his secret. Nevertheless, I learned a lot from his offer.

  The former minister was one of those people who’d asked me about my investigation and with whom I’d openly shared my evidence. Thus, implicit in his offer to tell me the truth about Freddie’s murder was an informed judgment that I did not yet know the whole truth. And since he thought that I worked for the US government, he was also implying that the Americans didn’t know the whole truth either. But there was also an implied representation in his offer: that Georgian investigators had discovered the identity and motive of the killer. The information his offer provided was tantalizing and encouraging. And it gave me confidence that it was really possible to solve this puzzle.

  American diplomats continued to rotate through Tbilisi, and Higgins continued to interview witnesses. He landed an audience with Saakashvili two days before Vice President Dick Cheney came to town. “Misha was eager to talk about anything except Anzor,” Higgins said. “Whenever I started asking questions about the Woodruff murder, he would lose interest and say it was time for him to do something else.”

  Soon Higgins finished talking and started writing. He asked me for a little more help with the documents but was otherwise guarded about his conclusions. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I think you’ll be satisfied.”

  At night I sat in the hotel café and watched the young wives of Georgia’s political elite compete for pride of place. The table at which a woman sat and the status that it implied depended directly on whether her husband’s fortunes were rising or falling. It was a junior high lunchroom with life-and-death implications.

  I left the country unsure whether I had actually accomplished anything. Higgins thought that his article would be published within a few days, but that didn’t work out. The 2008 financial crisis exploded in September and sucked up all the newsprint in the Wall Street Journal. For sixty days they wrote about one topic only: the worst economic disaster since the Great Depression of 1929. Then—on October 18, 2008—they wrote about Anzor Sharmaidze. And the next day the Georgian government released him from prison.

  CHAPTER 18

  * * *

  CONFESSIONS OF AN OLD SOLDIER

  There wasn’t anything new or surprising in Higgins’s article. The witnesses each reiterated the statements they’d previously made to me: Shevardnadze said it was a common crime; Gogoladze said that he was the intended target; Bedoidze said he was tortured and gave false testimony; and Anzor said he was framed—everything I’d been saying to anyone who would listen. The difference was that Higgins said them on the front page of the Wall Street Journal.

  The day after publication, someone from the Ministry of Justice called Anzor’s attorney, Tamaz Inashvili. “We’ve granted your application for parole,” the man said. “Go out to Ksani Prison and pick up your client.”

  It was welcome news but somewhat unexpected: No one had submitted an application for parole on Anzor’s behalf. Nevertheless, Tamaz picked him up and drove him home via the Old Military Road.

  But Anzor was not yet free. Parole released him from prison but left his conviction intact. His status as a felon deprived him of all social benefits and made him effectively unemployable. He was an outlaw and an outcast.

  A week later he called me in Houston. I had anticipated the call and imagined how the conversation would go: He would gush with gratitude and I would modestly deflect his praise. But that’s not exactly what happened.

  “You have to give me money,” he growled.

  “What do you mean give you money?” I sputtered. “I thought you were calling to thank me!”

  “Yeah, yeah—thanks, you saved my life,” he said. “But now you have to help me live it.”

  I confess that I felt some relief that I had avoided the embarrassment of effusive appreciation. And I did admire the cool logic and pragmatism of Anzor’s response to my generosity. But what surprised me most was that in the face of his apparent ingratitude I felt absolutely no disappointment or resentment.

  “Okay,” I said, “let’s figure out how we can get you some money.”

  The simple truth was that whatever I’d done I hadn’t done it for Anzor Sharmaidze as an individual. I didn’t actually know the man. And as a consequence, the fact of his gratitude or ingratitude didn’t really matter to me. What did matter was that my success had changed the way that certain intelligence officers related to me.

  When I initially started working on this case, the default assumption within the intelligence community was that I was an annoying and potentially dangerous dilettante. But by successfully engineering Anzor’s release over US and Georgian objections, I had demonstrated myself to be both credible and moderately resourceful. As a result, the presumption regarding me changed: Professional operators with knowledge of both Freddie’s murder and my work no longer assumed me to be an incompetent amateur.

  And some of them reached out to help. A year before Anzor’s release a US government spokesman had suggested that my efforts on behalf of the convict were merely a publicity stunt. A month after the release, an intelligence officer from the same agency contacted me.

  “Freddie and I were friends,” he told me. “And I was the first American to view his body. It was fairly obvious that he was dead, and that he’d been dead for some time. But I took a pulse anyway.”

  According to the officer, he was present when seventy-two hours after the murder the FBI shooting team discovered the bullet hole in the rear hatch of Eldar’s Niva. “It was a very hard-to-find bullet hole,” he said. “The projectile had gone through the rear window gasket and changed trajectory slightly as it passed through the metal skin of the car.”

  He didn’t think anyone could have planned such a shot. And it was on this basis, the improbability that a shooter could intentionally hit the gasket, that he and other government officials concluded that Freddie’s death was a tragic accident. But this conclusion didn’t logically follow from the evidence. As far as I could see, the improbability of hitting the gasket only meant that the shot wasn’t fired with the intent to hit the gasket. It didn’t mean that the shot wasn’t fired with the intent to hit Woodruff. If Anzor could allegedly fire his weapon and accidentally hit the gasket, then surely an assassin could fire his weapon and accidentally hit the gasket. Thus, the location of a bullet hole was not evidence that Freddie’s death was an accident. And by the same token it was not evidence that his death was the result of intentional murder.

  It was at best evidence of a bullet that might have killed Freddie. But that didn’t prove it was the bullet that killed Freddie. Nevertheless, the intelligence officer insisted that it did prove that. “Everything—blood spatters, trajectories, caliber, wound examinations—definitively proved that Freddie was killed by a round that passed through the Niva from the back/outside of the vehicle and struck him in the back/top of the head,” he said.

  This was a half-truth. The FBI shooting team had in fact determined that Freddie was sitting in the back seat of Eldar’s Niva at the time he was murdered. But without the shooter’s bullet and Freddie’s brain there was no way for them or anyone else to prove that the round had “passed through” the back hatch.

  The more I thought about the intelligence officer’s judgments, the less persuasive they seemed. He had without much evidence or analysis chosen to disregard the many witnesses who examined the Niva during the first twenty-four hours after the murder. In his opinion, Deputy Minister Avtandil Ioseliani, Eldar Gogoladze, Marina Kapanadze, and the senior investigators in the Georgian forensics
lab were either lying or mistaken when they said there was no bullet hole in the hatchback. And the intelligence officer had no easy answer to the FBI investigation report from the Bonn-based legal attaché. Special Agent George Shukin had examined the Niva the day after the murder and confirmed that the metal skin and glass of the car were undamaged. He was a credible witness and difficult to dismiss. All the intelligence officer could say was “It was a very hard-to-find bullet hole.”

  There was another graphic piece of evidence that needed to be accounted for—the horrific damage to Freddie’s skull. The gaping entry wound implied a much bigger projectile than the 5.45 × 39 mm bullets that Anzor’s AK-74 used. CIA officer Bob Baer had told me that based on the nature of Freddie’s injury he believed the shooter used a Dragunov sniper rifle, the long gun of choice for Russian assassins. In its 1993 configuration, that weapon fired a 7.62 × 54 mm steel-jacketed projectile, a bullet with a diameter of 7.92 mm. Thus, a Dragunov round was too wide to fit through the 8.5 × 6 mm bullet hole found in the Niva and reported in the Georgian investigation file. And according to Dell Spry, the irregular shape of this hole was caused by keyholing—when a bullet tumbles in flight and as a result strikes the surface at an oblique angle. But if a 7.62 × 54 mm Dragunov round struck the hatch at an oblique angle, it would have made a massive hole in the Niva. The only conclusion that accounted for all the evidence was that the Niva was stopped and the hatch was open at the time of the shooting.

  I had originally believed that Freddie was shot at the Natakhtari Drain. But the witnesses who were present on the side of the Old Military Road said they heard a gunshot and “less than a minute later” the Niva and the mortally wounded Freddie arrived from the north. These same witnesses reported that, upon arrival, Elena told the guardians that their friends had killed Freddie. This suggested the presence of guardians farther up the road.

  The witnesses said the guardians had been parked at the Drain since midday. That meant that if the shooter was at the shashlik shop in the mountains so that Marina could “showcase” Freddie, he’d had a second vehicle. And if he had a second vehicle, then he could have used it as a prop to give Eldar an excuse to stop the car. The shooter lay in wait as his team flagged down the Niva and asked for gas; Eldar opened the hatch and stepped back; the shooter killed Freddie. Since Eldar was not in the driver’s seat he was not at risk of being hit by a bullet that passed through Freddie’s head. But at the same time, because he was outside the car when Freddie was shot, Eldar wasn’t splattered with blood and brain. The chief bodyguard solved the problem of this damning cleanliness by delivering Freddie to the hospital and immediately going home to shower and change clothes.